In their annual report under the Animal Welfare Act for 1976,
Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories listed the use of 2,538
animals of species reportable under the Act. Battelle specified
that none of these animals, with ten exceptions, suffered any
pain or distress nor needed any pain-relieving drugs. Since the
Act requires no substantiation of the "no pain - no distress
- no drugs" listings and, very regrettably, no description
of the procedures involved, one can only marvel at how a large
laboratory can use animals in the many ways one knows they are
used and keep them all free of any distress. (USDA/APHIS,1976,
Battelle Memorial Inst.).

Gastro-intestinal Poisoning from Radionuclide

The ten unhappy few among these were a group of beagle dogs
noted under the heading "Pain-no drugs," and for this
listing the laboratory's attending veterinarian, Stephen E. Rowe,
supplied the required brief explanation. It is reproduced here
to illustrate a test of toxicity of a radioactive substance -
a type of testing to which many animals have been exposed and
sacrificed over the years:

"In experiments to obtain dose-related data to predict
the gastro- intestinal effects and gut-related radiation syndrome
of accidental ingestion of a strong beta emitting radionuclide
in man, 10 beagle dogs were given oral doses of 106 ru which
caused gastrointestinal lesions, diarrhea and death. Analgesics
were not used because they could be expected to alter gastrointestinal
motility, passage time of 106 ru in the intestine, radiation
dose to the gastrointestinal tract and other body functions to
an extent that reliable dose-related data could not be obtained.
To minimize pain the animals were sacrificed when clinical signs
indicated death was imminent. To minimize the numbers of animals
required for the experiments, the dose groups were completed
in sequence so that data from one dose group could be used to
plan sequential dose-groups." (Ibid.).

Fatal Radiation Pneumonitis

Another experiment, at the Lovelace Foundation, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, subjected young beagles to inhalation of particles
of Yttrium 90. Thirty-seven animals developed radiation pneumonitis
and died from 7 1/2 to 277 days after exposure. Postmortem examination
of the lungs of dogs who died after an acute illness showed an
inflammatory reaction with vascular congestion, accumulation of
fluid and occasionally tissue destruction in pulmonary blood vessels.
With pathology like this, the dogs must have experienced increasing
shortness of breath, coughing, choking and finally a suffocating
death. (Slauson, D., 1976).

Fifty-four Monkeys in the Electric Chair

Since everyone nowadays is nervous about radiation exposure,
there is plenty of money available for animal research in this
area, especially through the Defense Nuclear Agency. For those
investigators whose predilection is to rely heavily on conditioning
via punishing electric shock, this must be a boon as well as a
bonanza. It is not as easy as it used to be to shake the money
tree for support of interminable rat-shocking experiments whose
only justification is a vague promise that they will help us to
"understand aggression." But by devising a procedure
whereby an animal can be trained to escape painful shocks, then
irradiated to the point of incapacitation....yes, the public will
buy this because of the radiation angle, and even accept monkeys
as the victims rather than the despised rat.

A. Bruner and associates at the Lovelace Foundation are prominent
in this endeavor. In a typical experiment, they confined 54 rhesus
monkeys to plastic restraining chairs, with heads also in restraint,
from Monday morning to the following Friday afternoon. Electrodes
were attached to the legs, and different intensities of shock
applied to the feet, either "weak" shock, 6-13 milliamps,
0.5 sec., 60 Hz., "so as to produce a clear emotional reaction
but without vigorous escape movements," or "strong shock,
10-15 mA, 0.75 sec., 60 Hz., set to evoke strong escape movements
and vocalizations." (Parenthetically, 15 mA is excessively
strong and painful shock - 4 to 5 mA is painful to humans, more
than 6.5 is "unbearable." (Weisenberg, M.,1975, p.171).
It seems incredible that such agony could be inflicted on a small
monkey in restraint merely in a "training" procedure).
(Bruner, A.,1975)

When the monkeys were sufficiently "shaped" in conditioning
procedures to avoid foot shock by pressing a plastic button which
interrupted the circuit, they were exposed to different levels
of radiation to the whole body. In the next hour, like the rats
in the previous experiment, they gradually,lost their ability
to escape from shock, progressing from "performance decrement"
to "early transient incapacitation" in proportion to
the dose of radiation received.

Blood pressure and heart rate were measured in the experiments
by means of a femoral arterial catheter extended into the abdominal
aorta. This had been surgically implanted some days before irradiation,
no doubt adding to the physical distress of the immobilized animals
and, in fact, in several instances confusing the results of the
experiment, since "a few of the animals were already debilitated
prior to irradiation as a result of difficulties with their surgical
implants." To this variable must be added two more: the usual
retching and vomiting which naturally distracted some monkeys
from their shock-avoiding maneuvers, and fear, which although
totally ignored in the report, must inevitably have been caused
by the painful nature of the monkeys' task.

In spite of the variables, the author satisfies himself with the
aid of a complex "x2 contingency
analysis" that lowered blood pressure shortly after irradiation
"is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the occurrence
of performance decrement [and/or] early transient incapacitation"
in these monkeys. (Bruner, A,1977).

Experimenters Ignore Effects of Pain and Fear

Aside from the objection that the above experiments may be
adding very little to what is already known about performance
decrement in humans who have been accidentally exposed to various
forms of acute irradiation, there is a real objection on scientific
as well as humane grounds to the linking of the monkeys' task
to painful electric shock. That pain and fear are variables which
contaminate experimental results has been mentioned elsewhere
in this book. I have cited Harold Hillman, S. Iverson and A. Heim,
among others, and their criticism of procedures which gratuitously
introduce these stresses. At the very least, procedures could
have been devised in which the task is shaped by the withholding
of reward rather than the avoidance of punishment, or through
conditioning by positive reinforcement. Or, the performance decrement
might have been observed in disturbances of normal physiological
or behavioral rhythms (cf.p.77).

"Do You Have Any Idea How Miserable It Is to Die from
Radiation Injury?"

Incidentally, in his 1977 experiment Bruner mentioned that
one of the monkeys who received a high dose of radiation was permanently
incapacitated and in fact died within an hour after exposure.
The "difficulty with the surgical implants" may have
been partly responsible, or perhaps the effect of the shocks:
the investigator does not elaborate. However, a single death pales
beside reports, from the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks
Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, of a long-term project in
which 501 two-year old rhesus monkeys were exposed to proton radiation.
over a nine year period following irradiation this resulted in
279 deaths from chronic pneumonia, gangrenous skin necrosis, gastritis,
acute leukemia and other painful conditions. (Krupp,J.,1976).
Even more monkeys perished - 1,379 in the years 1972-1977, according
to the Washington Post (June 22, 1977) -in tests simulating
the effects of the neutron bomb at the Armed Forces Radiobiology
Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Donald Barnes, the psychologist already cited on p.128 and 133-134,
who participated in experiments like the above at Brooks Air Force
Base from 1964 until he left in 1980, commented as follows to
the International Primate Protection League:

"Assuming the animals survive training (and many of them
do not), my job was to determine their resistance to ionizing
radiation, i.e. neutron, gamma, flash X-ray. In years past, I
was ordered to keep a death watch on these irradiated subjects,
which meant, simply, to see what happened until they died of
radiation injury. Do you have any idea how miserable it is to
die from radiation injury? I do, I've seen so many monkeys go
through it.

At any rate, I finally got permission to sacrifice my subjects
after the experiment proper was completed (from 1 to 12 hours
as a rule). We injected them with a compound designed to slow
the heart gradually, thereby supposedly minimizing pain. I often
did this myself in order to minimize suffering occasioned by
clumsiness or ineptitude of technicians: on each occasion, I
felt more strongly that I didn't have the right to kill these
innocent creatures. As I became familiar with the use of the
data gained from these experiments, I discovered that the data
was not used to help Man in the struggle against his environment-the
data was (and is) used to generate more worthless experiments,
thereby killing and crippling more animals. I finally objected
to doing any more experiments in this area." (Anon., 1980f).

Monitoring the Human Mutation Rate

Some very pertinent comments on this subject were made by Norman
Anderson and his son Leigh, respectively director and staff member
of the Argonne National Laboratory's molecular anatomy program,
in a letter to The New York Times, written April 20, 1979:

"Potential increases in the rate of mutation and the
incidence of cancer and birth defects are the central concerns
arising from nuclear energy, medical X-rays and environmental
pollutants. A basic common denominator of these effects is genetic
injury. We do not know if the human mutation rate is being increased,
because it is not being measured."

Instead, they point out, the policy has been merely to measure
the radiation received when humans are known to have been exposed,
and to deduce possible effects by testing animal models similarly
exposed.

"Unfortunately, men are not mice, and mouse data is now
found to be of little value in pending court cases. No animal
is exposed to the same schedule of all the pollutants (dietary
and environmental), self-inflicted insults, drugs, X-rays or
the same microclimate to which we are exposed. The sum total
of these is what is of interest, and it decides the fate of the
individual and of future generations .... New
advances now make possible human mutation rate measurements."

Possible changes in it, they add, will provide an index of
potential increases in both cancer and birth defects. (Anderson,
N.G., 1979). To achieve this form of epidemiological study, large
populations of two million or more have to be monitored, since
the incidence of gene mutations in normal populations is very
low, and these mutations are subject to periodic fluctuations
in frequencies - thus data have to be collected over a number
of years.

The changes looked for are variants of proteins indicating variant
genes; chromosomal abnormalities in the blood of the newborn,
and congenital anomalies such as achondroplasia (dwarfism with
short legs and normal trunk). (,Grice, H., 1975). Once the background
mutation rate has been determined, increases in it can be detected
and the causes of these increases searched for.

The Checkered Human Condition Cannot be Copied in the Laboratory

In Apr. 1979 an article appeared in New Scientist entitled
"How Dangerous is Low-level Radiation?" It was written
by K.Z. Morgan, Neely Professor in the School of Nuclear Engineering
at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. (Morgan, K.,1979).
Its message was that the risk of developing cancer from low-level
ionizing radiation was much greater than had been imagined, and
that the medical profession was responsible for over 90% of the
man-made radiation delivered to the public. Professor Morgan's
data have been largely derived from epidemiological and clinical
studies on humans, including observations on the survivors of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and cancer statistics on workers in nuclear
plants. He has reservations about the thousands of experiments
conducted on animals and extrapolated "perhaps brazenly or
at best with misgivings" to man. He mentions variousreasons
for these misgivings. Not only does the response to a given dose
of radiation vary widely from species to species, it can also
differ markedly within a species: for example, sensitivity to
leukemia induction, and life expectation once the disease is established,
vary greatly with different kinds of mice. Furthermore, these
observations derive from carefully controlled, inbred healthy
animals, whereas "man is a wild or heterogeneous animal living
in many types of environment with various eating and drug habits,
with many diseases and eccentricities, of various ages, and so
on."

This checkered human condition cannot be copied in the laboratory,
yet it seems increasingly probable that the onset of a malignancy
or indeed other disease may be the consequence of many more events
than merely a-measured dose of radiation such as is delivered
to the thousands of beagles, monkeys and mice under experiment.
For example, says Morgan, "a given type of leukemia may require
as many as three successive events (like throwing three electrical
switches connected in series). Some of these switches may be thrown
by viruses, bacteria, chemicals, mechanical damage or radiation."

Prevention as an Alternative

In his recommendations for action Morgan says nothing about
additional testing of animals since he considers much of it inapplicable.
Instead, he emphasizes research programs to define more accurately
the risk from human exposure to ionizing radiation.

Although Morgan does not describe these it should be noted parenthetically
that, as an alternative to the experiments which seek to demonstrate
the pathology occurring in the fetus or in germ cells through
irradiation of the whole animal, it is now possible to study the
potential damage of irradiation in humans through the use of cell
cultures. The irradiated cells can be examined through an electron
microscope and minute chromosomal aberrations detected. The nature
of developmental defects can thus be predicted. (Federoff, S.,1975).

But Professor Morgan's main thrust is toward prevention, including
the reduction of exposure from all sources, particularly the nuclear
energy industry, and above all from the medical use of radiation.
He estimates that " a reduction of only 1% in unnecessary
diagnostic exposures in the U.S. would reduce the population dose
of man-made radiation more than the elimination of the nuclear
power industry to the year 2000."